Summary of the AWS Service Event in the US East Region
July 2, 2012
We'd like to share more about the service disruption which occurred last Friday night, June 29th, in one of our Availability Zones in the US East-1 Region. The event was triggered during a large scale electrical storm which swept through the Northern Virginia area. We regret the problems experienced by customers affected by the disruption and, in addition to giving more detail, also wanted to provide information on actions we'll be taking to mitigate these issues in the future.
Our US East-1 Region consists of more than 10 datacenters structured into multiple Availability Zones. These Availability Zones are in distinct physical locations and are engineered to isolate failure from each other. Last Friday, due to weather warnings of the approaching storm, all change activity in the US East-1 Region had been cancelled and extra personnel had been called into the datacenters for the evening.
...